I'm trying to think of short game design theory things that are either online or could hypothetically be found at a library and are not stupendously long.
If you're only going to read one thing, Greg Costikyan's I Have No Words and I Must Design [PDF, legal as far as I know] might be a good place to start. This is 25 pages long, which is long for a thing on the web, but hell and away shorter than a full-fledged game design textbook.
Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play is amazing, but it's also 600 freaking pages long. It is also analysis-focused--it will teach you a ton about theory but it won't teach you how to actually make a game. Ian Schreiber's web-based Game Design Conceptsdoes teaches game-making and has the beautiful virtue of being almost free if you can get the required text out of the library, but I wouldn't expect you to go through the whole thing for an RP! If you're curious about an example of card game design, there's David Sirlin's article on designing Yomi--don't sweat the details (some of which don't make a ton of sense unless you've played the game), you can just skim it.
For something you might be able to find in a library, and which is written (I think) pretty accessibly for a general audience rather than the hardcore game designer crowd, try Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken. McGonigal is a game designer with an interest in using games to make people's lives better. It's also less expensive than most game design textbooks, which tend to be pricey. (Ask me how I know.)
I would say that some main principles are:
- a game exists in an artificial "world" of its own (not necessarily in the sense of Middle-Earth, but in the sense that basketball or chess are not the "real world")
- a game's rules are arbitrary to a certain degree, and people willingly accept those arbitrary restrictions. Think about solitaire, for example. Solitaire is about sorting a deck of cards, but you're doing it with certain rules about how you can arrange and move cards, instead of just going through the deck and organizing it in the most efficient way possible, because the rules make it a challenge.
- the rules of a game determine what kinds of behaviors are rewarded and which are not. So if a computer game gives you lots of points for killing monsters, and doesn't reward you for diplomatic solutions to conflict, players are going to tend to kill things on sight rather than talking things out. (This can get meta, because obviously people cheat, modify the rules of games, etc.)
- In a sense, games are based around social contracts (players who agree to be bound by the rules of the game). Again, this can get meta real fast.
no subject
If you're only going to read one thing, Greg Costikyan's I Have No Words and I Must Design [PDF, legal as far as I know] might be a good place to start. This is 25 pages long, which is long for a thing on the web, but hell and away shorter than a full-fledged game design textbook.
Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play is amazing, but it's also 600 freaking pages long. It is also analysis-focused--it will teach you a ton about theory but it won't teach you how to actually make a game. Ian Schreiber's web-based Game Design Concepts does teaches game-making and has the beautiful virtue of being almost free if you can get the required text out of the library, but I wouldn't expect you to go through the whole thing for an RP! If you're curious about an example of card game design, there's David Sirlin's article on designing Yomi--don't sweat the details (some of which don't make a ton of sense unless you've played the game), you can just skim it.
For something you might be able to find in a library, and which is written (I think) pretty accessibly for a general audience rather than the hardcore game designer crowd, try Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken. McGonigal is a game designer with an interest in using games to make people's lives better. It's also less expensive than most game design textbooks, which tend to be pricey. (Ask me how I know.)
I would say that some main principles are:
- a game exists in an artificial "world" of its own (not necessarily in the sense of Middle-Earth, but in the sense that basketball or chess are not the "real world")
- a game's rules are arbitrary to a certain degree, and people willingly accept those arbitrary restrictions. Think about solitaire, for example. Solitaire is about sorting a deck of cards, but you're doing it with certain rules about how you can arrange and move cards, instead of just going through the deck and organizing it in the most efficient way possible, because the rules make it a challenge.
- the rules of a game determine what kinds of behaviors are rewarded and which are not. So if a computer game gives you lots of points for killing monsters, and doesn't reward you for diplomatic solutions to conflict, players are going to tend to kill things on sight rather than talking things out. (This can get meta, because obviously people cheat, modify the rules of games, etc.)
- In a sense, games are based around social contracts (players who agree to be bound by the rules of the game). Again, this can get meta real fast.
I hope some of this is helpful!